BOOKS
737
long way in securing a place in twentieth-century American literary
history for this enigmatic and fascinating figure. From his birth on Long
Island in 1910 his wanderings have taken him to Virginia, Paris, Berlin,
Latin America, Sri Lanka and Morocco (where he lives today), and
brought him in contact with a cast of modem musicians, writers, painters
and social gadflies including the likes of Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland,
Tennessee Williams, Barbara Hutton, Salvador Dali, and Mick Jagger.
It
is difficult to think of a life which embodies and reflects the major
impulses of this century more fully than Bowles's. Distaste for modern
society, skepticism about most cultural forms of authority, and a relentless
search for the differentiating experience have powerfully propelled him.
The life itself would be of considerable interest even had he not
produced a number of fine musical compositions, four novels, and more
than sixty stories.
Any reader of Bowles enters an utterly distinctive world where
American travelers to exotic lands fall prey to disease, psychological dis–
integration, and local terror; where the unconscious world, psychologi–
cally disrupted by drugs or other phenomenon, impinges on and often
consumes the rational; where sexual desires often find their satisfaction in
social and sanctified configurations; where man is adrift in his endless
quest to piece together some kind of meaning. Whether the medium
be words or notes, Bowles consistently has created aesthetically
pleasing forms . Probably best-known for his novel
The Sheltering Sky
(1949), which Bertolucci has recently transformed into film, Bowles
also has written and published more than sixty short stories, which
Gore Vidal claims "are among the best ever written by an Ameri-
can.
"
Richard F. Patteson's
A World Outside
is without question the best
full-length study of Bowles's fiction to date. Patteson, while being at
times theoretical, never loses sight of the stories and novels he is dis–
cussing. Appropriately he acknowledges that the major fact affecting
Bowles's art has been his "disinclination to live in (and for the most part,
even to write about) the country of his origin." This decision, Patteson
contends, "stamps his art with an indelible mark." From this initial ob–
servation, Patteson moves to look at what he terms "the related issues of
shelter and exposure, interiority and exteriority" which give the fiction
its "distinctive form." Noting that Bowles's characters frequently leave
"safe" environments and put themselves in "dangerous" situations, Patte–
son tells us that they do so in order to "challenge the dominance of the
outside world - not to surrender to it."
In
his readings of all four published novels
(The Sheltering Sky
J
Let It
Come Down, The Spider's House
and
Up Above the World)
and a good
many stories such as "A Delicate Prey," "Pages from Cold Point," and
"Kitty," Patteson draws our attention to the significance of architectural
